Earlier this month Gazeta Wyborcza announced the longlist for the 2008 Nike Prize, which is awarded to the best Polish book from last year.

The website is less than helpful—every time I click on the “more” button about the prize, I’m brought back to the same opening page and the fragmented statement—and totally in Polish, but what I can decipher is pretty interesting. There are twenty finalists and the winner will be announced in October. Starting earlier this month, the site started highlighting a finalist a day, which is a pretty nice feature.

Here’s the longlist in all its untranslated glory:

Lidia Amejko: Żywoty świętych osiedlowych

Jacek Dukaj: Lód

Paweł Huelle : Ostatnia Wieczerza

Jerzy Jarniewicz: Znaki firmowe

Urszula Kozioł: Przelotem

Ewa Lipska: Pomarańcza Newtona

Małgorzata Łukasiewicz: Rubryka pod różą

Ewa Madeyska: Katoniela

Andrzej Mandalian: Poemat odjazdu

Piotr Matywiecki: Twarz Tuwima

Włodzimierz Nowak: Obwód głowy

Jerzy Pilch: Pociąg do życia wiecznego

Janusz Rudnicki: Chodźcie, idziemy

Mariusz Sieniewicz: Rebelia

Andrzej Sosnowski: Po tęczy

Bronisław Świderski: Asystent śmierci

Andrzej Szczeklik: Kore

Małgorzata Szejnert: Czarny ogród

Olga Tokarczuk: Bieguni

Krzysztof Varga: Nagrobek z lastryko

Great to see Jerzy Pilch on this list (we’re publishing The Mighty Angel next April), and we just got a copy of Pawel Huelle’s Castorp (a finalist for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) in for review.

I’l post more useful, reliable info about the individual titles as soon as I can find it. (Google Translator sucks as much as Babelfish with the Polish. See: “Contemporary American prose, it is impossible to describe, but fragmentary. Zwielokrotniła so much that the world is not literally.” Yes, yes Zwielokrotnila is that much.)

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The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón
Reviewed by Vincent Francone

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